Honda is working with Chinese AI unicorn SenseTime on self-driving car tech

6 months

Honda is putting the focus on artificial intelligence after it announced a partnership with SenseTime, a Chinese startup valued at over $1 billion, that will power its autonomous cars of the future.

SenseTime, which raised a $410 million funding round this past summer and counts Qualcomm among its investors, is particularly well known for its object recognition technology which has been used by both public and private entities in China. The startup has agreed to a five-year joint R&D project with Honda that will see its AI and deep learning smarts combined with Honda’s automotive focused-AI tech to develop solutions that the car-maker hopes will enable self-driving cars to operate safely in urban areas.

Honda’s own AI falls into ‘scene understanding,’ ‘risk prediction,’ and ‘action planning,’ all of which relates to gauging urban motoring scenarios and responding to them in the right way. It said earlier this year that it plans to introduce cars with level 4 automation by 2020.

SenseTime is widely tipped to land a $227 million investment from Alibaba before the year is out. Adding a big name automotive player as a partner is sure to only make its business more attractive to other investments and collaborators.